New York Hotel Wiggles, Shines, Stands Out: James S. Russell

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Like a spinnaker frozen in glass, the 21-story Cooper Square Hotel billows above beat-up tenement buildings in Manhattan’s gentrifying East Village. It opens Thursday, just in time to sail into stormy economic seas.

Taking aim at a film, music, fashion and advertising clientele, the $115 million hotel, just down the Bowery from the venerable Cooper Union, offers ready access to East Village and Lower East Side hipster havens like the New Museum. SoHo’s high- end shops are just blocks away.

Klaus Ortlieb, who conceived the hotel and is a partner in the management firm MK Hotels, explained that he needed an architecturally significant building to attract guests to a location off the beaten luxury track.

That alone counts as a radical departure. Arty pretension is abundant in downtown hotels, yet architecture is at best an afterthought. The Cooper Square’s New York architect, Carlos Zapata, is no household name, though he has a rare touch: the ability to create sculptural drama with finesse.

The slim, all-glass tower, enclosing just 145 rooms, makes plenty of attention-seeking gestures. It swells outward as it rises, then tips back. Facets along the side wiggle in and out, changing from glass to hole-punched metal panels. These surfaces look stretched taut, as if under enormous internal pressure.

If it sounds like too many ingredients and too many ideas, Zapata molds them into a seemingly effortless whole rather than a nervous assemblage of tics.

He has fused the hotel with a battered tenement building next door, which has been saved along with the tenancy of two women who have lived through the neighborhood’s extended tough times to see it flower.

Echoing the Neighborhood

Zapata animated the entrance by erecting a little four-story tower that bookends the tenement and looks ripped from the main tower at the base. Above, he has peeled away the shiny skin to reveal squared-off tubular shapes in tan and green. This lets the tower echo the ragged silhouette of the long-neglected tenement neighborhood. Its contrasting lightness doesn’t weigh down the layers of red brick, terra-cotta rickrack and dangling fire escapes that give the streets such evocative character.

In spite of its size and contemporary styling, the hotel is no heedless intruder.

The jumble of shapes at the entrance opens a chasm of space into which Zapata hangs a glass canopy that curves up in welcome. It may be the most theatrical hotel entrance in New York, yet it maintains an inviting intimacy.

Green on Gray

A stairway guides guests past the bar and lobby up to a more intimate lounge and screening room. The stair frames a view to the narrow stripe of greenery that runs beyond the hotel, through the center of the block’s masonry grayness.

The lobby rises as a high tube of frameless curved glass fastened by elegant metal clamps. Inside, Milan furniture designer Antonio Citterio has hung a silvery, diaphanous curtain and contrasted low hovering benches with an intricate Persian carpet and handsome pillbox chairs of his own design.

More designer chairs cluster around a crackling fire in the low-ceilinged library that’s tucked into the tenement. The effect is calming.

Citterio banishes the razor edges and discotheque ironies that self-consciously afflict the hip hotel market. Hipster attitude is banished, too. There’s no lobby check-in. A hotel greeter escorts you to your room.

Spectacular Views

The modeling of the exterior leads to 35 room variations, many with multiple exposures to spectacular urban panoramas. The rooms are smallish, yet Citterio orders them with shipboard precision and low-key luxe: gray leather headboards; a handsome, oblong desk in warm oak, mounted on thin brushed-metal supports; and a metal ladder for books leaned against the wall.

Citterio’s touch is suave, comfortingly elegant.

The 1,600 square-foot, three-bedroom, full-floor penthouse ($7,500 a night) opens to expansive views on four sides. The huge terraces include a private outdoor shower that squirts upward.

While construction wraps up, Ortlieb offers an introductory rate of $275, down from $375. It won’t hurt if Los Angeles chef Govind Armstrong packs them into Table 8, the hotel’s restaurant. In two intimate spaces facing a back garden (opening this winter), Govind will offer white-tablecloth dining, a charcuterie and a casual bistro.

Architecture is just one factor in a hotel’s success. Yet design of such thoroughness and distinction remains so rare that Ortlieb has got a leg up in his race to build a clientele in a tough market.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg’s U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.